On Tuesday, a San Francisco jury found IT consultant Nima Momeni guilty of the 2023 stabbing death of tech executive Bob Lee, which sparked worries about the city’s high rate of street crime but was actually the result of a personal argument.
Momeni was convicted of murder in the second degree. Deliberations began on December 4 and a verdict was reached on Monday, but it was read out on Tuesday.
Early on April 4, 2023, Lee, 43, the creator of the well-known money transfer app Cash App, was discovered stabbed close to downtown San Francisco. After being taken to a hospital, he passed away from his wounds.
A dispatcher reported to the police that a man was screaming, yelling for aid, and saying, “Someone stabbed me,” according to recordings.
When Elon Musk of SpaceX wrote on social media following Lee’s passing on violence in San Francisco and asked the district attorney about violent repeat offenders, the case instantly became controversial.
Instead, Momeni, 40, who is not a repeat offender and whose sister was friends with Lee, was arrested, according to San Francisco police a week later.
Momeni was charged with taking Lee to a remote location and using a 4-inch kitchen knife to stab him three times. Lee’s heart was stabbed.
Momeni argued with Lee about his sister, according to the prosecution, and he intended to kill Lee.
According to Momeni’s testimony, on April 3, his sister called and requested him to come get him from Lee’s friend’s residence, whom she said was a drug dealer. The sister stated that after using the drug GHB, she told her brother that she might have experienced sexual assault.
In court filings, prosecutors claimed that a witness saw Momeni asking Lee “about whether his sister was doing drugs or anything inappropriate” the night of the murder, and Lee had to tell him that nothing had happened.
When Lee pulled a knife on him, Momeni said he responded in self-defense.
Momeni informed jurors that Lee had been using narcotics the night before the attack. Momeni said that after Momeni joked that he would like to spend his final night in San Francisco with his family rather than at strip clubs, Lee attacked him. They were in a car together when they pulled over because Momeni felt Lee was about to throw up.
Momeni asserted that he had to protect himself when Lee produced the knife. According to Momeni, Lee walked away down the street after a scuffle over the weapon, but Momeni was unaware that Lee had been stabbed.
On October 14, the trial got underway. According to opening statements by Assistant District Attorney Omid Talai, Lee, who was the chief product officer of MobileCoin, a cryptocurrency firm at the time, was “stabbed through his heart and left to die.”
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